3072: Stargazing 4

2025-04-05T21:49:26Z

172.71.30.133: Undo revision 371514 by Darth Vader (talk) Are we sure this is Danish?

{{comic
| number = 3072
| date = April 4, 2025
| title = Stargazing 4
| image = stargazing_4_2x.png
| imagesize = 740x386px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BAD YELP REVIEW. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This is the fourth comic in the [[:Category:Stargazing|Stargazing]] series, and it followed [[2274: Stargazing 3]] that came out five years before. That was the longest stretch between two comics in the series so far.

The host [[Megan]] begins the introduction by referencing rude {{w|Yelp}} reviews of her stargazing lessons. The reviewers doubt that she is actually a qualified astronomer due to how simplistic her lessons are; they claim she is just saying the words that come to mind.

Then she states that there are over 20 stars in the sky and some of them are over the age of 100. Both of these statements are true, but extreme understatements. A few thousand stars are visible to the unaided eye under good viewing conditions. Stars are typically billions of years old. Though in a city there could be less than 20 stars visible even in a clear night; in a normal stargazing session the event should though be moved to a place with as little light pollution as possible. [[1556: The Sky|Daylight or clouds]] may further reduce visible stars. Although, given the unprofessional nature of Megan's lessons, there is no guarantee that it does not take place in a city.

Megan states that our galaxy is huge and that there are more grains of sand in the {{w|Milky Way}} than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches. This is a parody of the common saying that there are more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. Since the Earth's sand is a subset of all of the galaxy's sand, and there are more planets with sand other than Earth (such as Mars), there are unquestionably more grains of sand in the Milky Way than on Earth. Tangentially, it is unclear whether the stars outnumber Earth's sands, as shown here: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-stars-outnumber-the-sands-of-earths-beaches/ Do Stars Outnumber the Sands of Earth’s Beaches?] and here: [https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-ever-lasting-question-more-sand-or-stars/ The ever-lasting question: more sand or stars?]. Also, the original quote was all the sand on Earth, not just on the beaches. Megan adds a helpful hint, calling a beach a big wet sandbox.

She then finishes the lesson by correctly saying that there is a black hole in the center of our galaxy ({{w|Sagittarius A*}}), and that stars sometimes fall in and get consumed by the black hole. When stars come too close to black holes, they experience a {{w|tidal disruption event}} (TDE), where a star is pulled apart by the black hole after exceeding its {{w|Roche limit}}. This creates streams of material that orbits the black hole and forms an accretion disk, that will eventually be consumed by the black hole or ejected in jets.

She adds her personal opinion on this fact saying that such events are "hilarious" and proceeds by saying that it's okay to laugh at the fate of those stars as the gravity of the black hole will prevent any signals from those stars escaping. This is due to black holes' immense gravitational attraction that prevents even light from escaping. In Megan's case the most important consequence of this fact is that anyone on planets around such stars cannot leave Yelp reviews if they hear her laughing. Thus, they cannot add to those that mock her lesson.

However, as the Roche limit of a black hole is always greater than its {{w|Schwarzschild radius}}, reviews made just after the star begins spaghettification could still escape the black hole. Not only do stars not use any kind of human-made technology,{{citation needed}} but any information regarding the app Yelp has yet to reach any star near Sagittarius A*, and will only reach it in 27 thousand years. It is much more likely that someone living on one of the star's planets would try to leave a comment on Yelp, not the star itself. But the same issues with distances would of course apply. It also seems unlikely that any planet would still be following a star when it first gets that close to a super massive black hole.

In the title text Megan claims that we haven't actually seen a star fall into a black hole (or ''the'' black hole that she is describing) since we invented telescopes. In reality, over a hundred TDEs have been discovered in a variety of wavelengths, including by the Hubble telescope. The way title text is phrased though she might have meant fall into specifically Sagittarius A*, and while it is true that we haven't observed any star fall into our closest supermassive black hole, the {{w|Sagittarius_A*#Discovery_of_G2_gas_cloud_on_an_accretion_course|G2 gas cloud on an accretion course}} was discovered in 2002. Megan also apparently has a list of stars she would like to see fall into the black hole. But she can keep hoping as humans at this time have no way of changing the orbit of any star. So unless she is hoping for one (or more) of the closer stars to fall in next, she is unlikely to experience success based on her list.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[The background is black, Megan is in front of three others, Cueball and Ponytail to the left, and White Hat to the right. Megan is drawn in white while the background characters are in grey.]
:Megan: Welcome back to Stargazing.
:Megan: According to some ''incredibly'' rude Yelp reviews, I'm "not informative" and "can't possibly be an astronomer" and "just kind of say words as they occur to me."
:Megan: I guess some losers just hate cool space facts!

:[The sky is white, the floor is black, Megan is pointing at the sky. Hairy, a Megan-like woman (with a longer hair), Cueball, and Ponytail are on the left, White Hat and Hairbun are on the right. All of the characters are drawn in black.]
:Megan: Anyway, that dot is a "star."
:Megan: There are over 20 stars in the sky, and some of them are more than 100 years old.

:[The background is black again, the panel zooms in on Megan's face.]
:Megan: Our galaxy is huge.
:Megan: You know the beach? That big wet sandbox?
:Megan: Well, there are more grains of sand in the Milky Way than in all Earth's beaches combined.
:Off-panel voice to the left: Wow.
:Off-panel voice to the right: ...Wait.

:[The background is still in black, Megan is in front of others and has her finger raised, Ponytail is left of Megan, White Hat and Hairbun on the right. Megan is again drawn in white while the background characters are in grey.]
:Megan: The galaxy has a black hole at the center.
:Megan: Sometimes stars fall in, which is ''hilarious''.
:Megan: Don't worry, it's okay to laugh. The gravity prevents signals from escaping, so they can't leave Yelp reviews.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Stargazing]]
[[Category:Comics sharing name|Stargazing]]
[[Category:Comics with inverted brightness]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Danish]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]

Talk:535: It Might Be Cool

2024-03-18T15:25:10Z

172.71.30.133:

How many life sentences has the idiot had to commute?
And how long after they were given?

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 19:01, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
:You're going to have to be more specific on which idiot you are referring to. Your comment is kind of a non sequitur. -Pennpenn [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.162|108.162.250.162]] 01:55, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank goodness, we all now know how transphobic this cartoon, and by extension Randall Munroe, is. Who says a woman has to menstruate, or have ovaries? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.243|172.69.43.243]] 12:10, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
:Not sure you can assert any of that, from the comic. You're reading too much into it. But, just so this statement isn't left hanging, I'll run through some obvious counter-arguments.
:Yes, trans-women currently cannot menstruate, etc. Yet I bet there are some who would want to, should medicine (or magic) be able to grant them that ability. Left-Cueball might well be imagining just such a hypothetical and technomagical situation where trans-ness isn't just a case of finding a sweet spot along the line of "passing/top-surgery/top-and-bottom-surgery" that you can happily reach, but extends all the way to total biological and corporeal sex-flip, internals and all. The series of comics have presented far more radical 'reality shifts' than that.
:This particular comic targets and parodies the swearing-in process, as referenced. The (wrong) words are not important, except that they are one non-sequitur of many possible ones, just because it needed something sufficiently out there and not really relevent to the situation, that fits the "not a conversation, but a ceremony-gone-off-script" format. If he'd gone with something like "how do I know that the red that I see is the red that you see?", you could argue he was colour-blind-ist, but still the joke is the same, and there's really no reason to believe Randall has transphobic tendencies by deliberate exclusion.
:Failure to be ''inclusive'' is harder to deal with. (By failing to have many (any?) non-white Cueballs, maybe it could be said that he's implicitly racist, but he's definitely not ''explicitly'' racist and has definitely included non-white real-life/externally-fictional characters with no reason to suspect malice. Just hasn't balanced things up, perhaps, in his standard homegrown 'cast of actors'. But, if he does, you just know that he'll be accused of being ''too woke'', by the kind of person who thinks 'being woke' is an insult.) Social failure, but not necessarily a personal flaw and attitudinal bias. That said, who knows how many 'female' characters are (without us knowing it, and no 'performative fuss' made to explain it) actually M2F-trans, and 'male' ones vice-versa?
:They're stick figures. They can have any biologies they need to have, including Infinite Wings! Arguably, Randall is sympathetically feminist, given the diverse roles he gives (apparent) female characters, but there's no reason at all to consider him a TERF. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.26|172.70.85.26]] 14:23, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
:Please let this be a troll post. Putting aside the fact that this is a 2009 comic certainly written without this angle as its focus, how is associating females with menstruation transphobic? If he said, "it would be cool to be a bird, but that flying thing is freaky", would you say he has something against penguins? This comic was clearly written to highlight Randall's quirky wandering line of thought and how it confounds people around him, not to define what a woman is. This is not malicious, and calling it ignorant is unfair - trans people weren't in the public consciousness in 2009, so it's not his fault for thinking of this angle when writing a short comic about, ALLOW ME TO REPEAT, a COMPLETELY UNRELATED TOPIC.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.26.217|172.71.26.217]] 15:13, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
:I'm all for inclusion, but not actively including isn't necessarily excluding. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.30.133|172.71.30.133]] 15:25, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

3072: Stargazing 4

Talk:535: It Might Be Cool